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The Future is Freelancing, Says Upwork’s CEO

“The old world is not coming back,” Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel predicts. “The future is much more independent than the past.” Kasriel is well worth listening to in this regard, considering he runs the world’s largest freelancing website, one that counts five million businesses and twelve million freelancers among its users. There are three main parts to a freelancer’s working life, Kasriel says: getting new business, actually doing the work, and doing administrative tasks like invoicing and filing taxes. Upwork aims to ease the burden of the first and third components so that freelancers can focus on actually doing the work they want to be doing.

Freelancers represent a far from insignificant chunk of the global economy—they earn one trillion a year in the United States alone, Kasriel says, or ten percent of the U.S. economy. While the numbers vary widely depending on how freelancers or independent workers are classified, Upwork’s 2016 Freelancing in America report found that one-third of U.S. workers did some amount of freelance work in the past year, and one-quarter of those freelancing workers are doing so full time. Kasriel predicts that companies will increasingly rely on freelancers rather than full-time employees, much in the way that today movie studios use mostly contractors on a per-project basis. In Hollywood’s 20th century heyday, roles were filled predominantly by full-time staff.

In addition to other challenges for freelancers, our educational system is failing to train workers on the skills of the future, Kasriel says, and our banking system fails independent workers by prioritizing W-2s rather than 1099s in determining credit scores. We need to recognize and adapt to the increasingly hybrid, remote, and piecemeal nature of work in order to shrink, rather than exacerbate, the gaping inequality currently plaguing our economy. Most employees hate their jobs, Kasriel points out, but don’t switch to freelancing because they’re worried about being able to pay the bills. How do we create products that make people feel safer in choosing to manage their personal lives around their work, rather than the other way around?

Among those workers who do continue to work full-time, Kasriel is a strong proponent of remote work—at least for certain types of tasks. Brainstorming sessions are, for the most part, best accomplished face-to-face, Kasriel believes, but being in an office is often more harmful than helpful when it comes to the execution of work, particularly in open-plan workspaces where distractions abound. He cited a recent Stanford study that indicated that office workers are actually more productive when they work from home than when they work in an office. Remote work is also a boon for the economy and society at large, in Kasriel’s opinion, because it alleviates the burden of packing workers into a few urban hubs, and allows those who so choose to live closer to their families and communities. As things currently stand, many workers are either struggling because of the high cost of living in these urban hubs, or they’re struggling because of a lack of opportunity. “We need to reverse the trend of the Industrial Revolution and allow the work to go where the worker is, rather than trying to cram more people into cities,” says Kasriel.